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Article

I Get No Ideas Inside the Machine

· 05 Jul 2026 · 11 min read

At Cables of Resistance, I ran a workshop asking if we can build hardware without capitalism. I was grieving what AI is doing to open source. Technologists need to see there's no innocent ground under the machine. It was always someone's land.…

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Interior of a telephone switching station in Hamburg from the 1800s.
AI

The Luddite Stack: or How to Outlast the AI Ice Age

Subsidise, kill the competition, lock in the overpriced mess: the monopoly playbook now runs on AI. A guide to building the kind of stack that can outlast the subsidies when they end.…

11 Feb 2025 · 3 min read
Neo-Assyrian clyndrical seal may illustrate a scene from the epic of creation in which the forces of chaos, led by Tiamat, ar
AI

The Future is Meaningless and I Hate It

The Semantic Web promised a digital future that actually understood us. Instead we got brute-force models passing probability off as comprehension. On the meaning we were promised and the noise we got.…

28 Oct 2024 · 4 min read
A green wall in Soho New York with the works "Post No Bills" plastered all over.
Internet & Infrastructure

Mozilla: All We Want is a User Agent

Part frustration, part former appreciation. On Mozilla's turn toward 'privacy-first' advertising, and the quiet wish that it would go back to building a browser that works for the person using it.…

18 Oct 2024 · 3 min read
A Lithograph of a butcher on his knees banging on his chest, next to a woman crying into a napkin. There are animal carcasses
Open Source

I Was Wrong About the Open Source Bubble

A follow-up, and a correction. Revisiting the open source bubble argument after the responses came in, including the ones that stopped at the title.…

15 Sep 2024 · 2 min read
In the pictured composite of 33 exposures, parallel streaks from Starlink satellites are visible over southern Brazil. Sunflo
Policy

Suspending X: Brazil’s Ongoing Struggle to Govern Big Tech

Musk called it a free-speech violation. Brazil called it refusing to follow the law. Past the inflammatory tweets, what the suspension of X reveals about whether any state can govern Big Tech.…

31 Aug 2024 · 4 min read
Print shows an oversized man labeled "Promoter" sitting atop a ticker tape machine, holding a large butterfly net into which
Open Source

Is the Open Source Bubble about to Burst?

Open source isn't a hype bubble like crypto or the metaverse. It's something stranger: a real one, built on how completely the digital world has come to depend on work it barely funds.…

23 Aug 2024 · 5 min read
Three members of the Thin Lizzy Hard Rock Band on a Stage, silhouette
Open Source

Faking Git Till You Make It: Open Source Maintainers Beware of Reputation Farming

It has a name: reputation farming. The under-reported, slightly dangerous practice of manufacturing open source credibility through hollow GitHub activity, and why maintainers should care.…

25 Jun 2024 · 3 min read
A painting of a horse being startled by a Snake.
Open Source

What on Earth is Open Source AI?

The Open Source AI definition fight, from someone who thinks the AI gold rush is both an environmental disaster and badly oversold. What 'open' can and cannot mean once you bolt it onto a model.…

15 Jun 2024 · 3 min read
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